Last month, Major League Baseball club owners unanimously awarded Bud Selig a contract extension that will keep him as baseball’s commissioner through 2012. “The Campaign to Re-Elect Bud” gained its momentum in large part because of Selig’s financial accomplishments. Since he took office, MLB revenue has climbed from $1.6 billion per year in 1992 to more than $6 billion in 2007. According to Boston Red Sox owner Tom Werner, MLB is now in “an era of unparalleled popularity and prosperity.”
At a time when Congress is investigating performance-enhancing drug use in baseball, re-electing Selig, former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, amounts to playing with fire. This is exactly the kind of result that Albert Lasker sought to prevent when he first proposed that baseball owners hire an independent, outside commissioner in 1921.
During the 1919 season, MLB club owners had been accused of miserliness in their dealings with players. Then, during that year’s World Series, eight members of the Chicago White Sox purportedly conspired with gamblers to throw the games. As a result, public confidence in baseball plummeted. MLB owners thereafter needed to find a way to re-establish trust.
Fearing wrath from both fans and Congress, Lasker, a Chicago Cubs shareholder from 1916 until 1925, persuaded MLB club owners to meet with him in Chicago on Jan. 12, 1921. On that date, he introduced a plan to vest full regulatory authority over all aspects of baseball in an independent, outside commissioner — free from any partisanship. As described by political science professor Jerold Duquette in his 1999 book “Regulating the National Pastime,” “[t]hese commissioners would be powerful men who had no financial interest in the game.”
To make the commissioner position fully autonomous, Lasker persuaded MLB owners to allow the president of the United States to directly appoint baseball’s commissioners. Although no president has ever exercised this power, MLB club owners until 1992 had followed the spirit of the Lasker Plan by nominating only commissioners that were seen as independent. Although this approach did not always produce perfect candidates, having a neutral outsider running baseball made Congress confident that there was always an ombudsman to protect the game’s integrity. As a result, Congress rarely intervened in the national pastime’s “private” business.
Since MLB clubs abandoned the Lasker Plan by hiring Selig as interim commissioner in 1992 (they removed the “interim” tag in 1998), Congress’ confidence in the sport has waned based on a perceived lack of independent leadership. For example, on July 15, 1995, Selig told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “[i]f baseball has a [steroids] problem, I must say candidly that we were not aware of it.” In that same article, two MLB players detailed their concerns about ongoing steroid use, and MLB general managers predicted the rate of use as high as 30 percent.
MLB club owners had the golden opportunity to restore some of this lost confidence by announcing the return of an independent, outside commissioner upon Selig’s retirement in 2009. However, MLB club owners have opted to stick with a commissioner who caters to the owners at the expense of other stakeholder groups, including players, the union, cities and fans. For example, under Selig’s leadership, MLB canceled the 1994 World Series, threatened to contract the Minnesota Twins and refused to share the contents of the Mitchell Report with the MLBPA before his news conference — all behavior that a truly independent, outside commissioner might have rejected.
MLB’s decision to extend Selig’s commissionership is a tremendous mistake. Even if one judges Selig to have done a good job of leading baseball over the past 16 years, the risks associated with abandoning safeguards imposed by the Lasker Plan far outweigh any benefit.
For MLB to move forward effectively in the 21st century, it is time to return to the era of an independent, outside commissioner.
Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a professor of sports law at New York Law School and Seton Hall University and teaches courses in sports law and sports economics at Manhattanville College.
